


There was a Ghostbusters Cereal in the Eighties

by Lissamel



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, For a friend mostly, Ghosts, How Do I Tag, I Don't Even Know, I researched a whole bunch of 80s stuff for this, It's an AU of course, M/M, Putting it on here in case anyone else likes it, Silly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-23
Updated: 2013-11-23
Packaged: 2018-01-02 09:59:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1055433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lissamel/pseuds/Lissamel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, "John discovers a ghost with ridiculous fashion taste, and they become friends or something."</p><p>Written for a sick friend. Oneshot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There was a Ghostbusters Cereal in the Eighties

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JaysNarnia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaysNarnia/gifts).



_Blip-beep_.

“Jade, I’m never listening to you again.”

A blocky, light-chartruse-green and white Flip video camera was attached to a small tripod, staring out into the parlor of a rickety old house. It was recording, shown by the little shining red light. A male stood in front of it, pushing his rectangular glasses farther up his nose.

“Okay. So, for Halloween, Jade decided to dare me to go into this haunted house and record my findings. And then, y’know, put it up on YouTube and stuff. Well, joke’s on her, because it’s the perfect time to test my pro Ghostbusting abilities. So _ha ha_ , Jade!”

He kneeled out of the camera’s view, but kept talking. If he planned to post this on YouTube, as Jade’s dare had entailed, he couldn’t have any dead air. “I couldn’t actually find any proton packs, though, so I had to raid the closet to get the next best thing.” He shuffled through a bag he had brought with him before jumping up, holding a handheld shot-vac in one hand and a flashlight in the other. “I’ll just deal with ‘em the _Luigi’s Mansion_ way! This won’t be worth shit if I have to deal with Zuul, but I figure he won’t be here.”

He paused. With his hands full of vacuum and flashlight, how was he supposed to video tape himself? He should have thought of this before he decided to bust ghosts the _Luigi’s Mansion_ way. “I’m gonna click it off now, ‘kay? I’ll just edit this together at home.” He wasn’t the best at video editing, but he was sure he could throw some transition animation here and everything will be fine. “Be back when things happen, folks!” And with that, he hopped behind the camera and clicked it off, picking up the tripod and tucking it under an arm.

God was this awkward.

He fumbled along, leaving the bag in the rickety house’s parlor. This house was located in the middle of a dense forest, and commonly speculated to be haunted. Many a child’s horror story took place here. Werewolves, vampires, witches, skeletons, and like thirty hauntings--If it was supernatural, it probably happened here. Of course, John Egbert didn’t believe in children’s horror stories, but he did want to see a ghost here. Because, come on, a real ghost! That _he_ discovered! That would be so cool, even if it probably wouldn’t put him in any history books. He trotted down the front hall, not clicking his flashlight on yet, since as _everyone_ knew you had to wait until the ghost showed itself to shine the light on it’s heart and catch it in your vacuum.

He didn’t even own a Gamecube, much less _Luigi’s Mansion_. Why did he know so much about it?

The hallway lead into a dining hall, and befitting of any abandoned, rickety old house it had a large dining table still in there, as well as a few cabinets presumably to hold fine china in the walls. He set the tripod back up, happy to have a place to set that thing, and was about to click it on again when his eyes twitched back to something stuffed in one of the cabinets.

Something red.

Slowly, he went over to the cabinet, raising an eyebrow. Awkwardly moving both the shot-vac and the flashlight into one hand, he opened it and took out the red thing, shaking it out.

It was a jacket. Some kind of eighties-style Member’s Only jacket. He blinked, frowning at it. “Geez, why was this in a cabinet?”

“Hey, good job finding that old thing. Y’mind getting me outta’ here, then?”

John screeched, startled, whirling around and clicking his flashlight on. There was someone on the table. He was blond, hair styled in something that looked like it wanted to be a mullet but could not be a mullet. For apparel, it looked like the personification of the eighties threw up on his body and morphed that puke into clothing. Wayfarer sunglasses, acid-washed jeans, a white shirt with a bunch of multicolored paint splatters on it that were most certainly not from painting anything, and the red jacket John held over it. His sneakers, however, were a muted grey. He sat up, tipping those Wayfarers down just so he could see his eyes. “Seriously, I’ve been stuck here, what--Twenty-some years? I’m sick of this goddamn house. Can you, like, chuck that coat into the woods or something? That’d be perfect.”

John opened his mouth, then closed it again. “Uh…” He began, debating on if asking if someone was dead was really rude.

“Yeah, I know, these clothes are fuckin’ terrifying.” He looked down at himself, pushing the sunglasses back up his nose. “Look at me. You need to bring in an authentic eighties coolkid, well, here’s your chance. Step right up and claim your prize. You could bring me to, like, one of those carnival freakshows. Yeah. Step up, step up, see the amazing eighties kid! Five bucks for a picture! Seriously though these clothes are fuckin’ awful and I’ve had twenty-some years to be wearing and deeply contemplating my fashion choices. But back in my high school? This shit was cool, man. All the girls with the huge curly hair and the legwarmers and shit were all over, beggin’ for a piece of the Strider ass they could not obtain. A tragic tale of love and loss, really.”

As the ghost spoke, John crept back to the video camera and clicked it on, carefully aiming it at the specter. He had been filming this rant on fashion for a good ten seconds before Strider glanced over, seeing the camera. “Oh, that a camera?” He snickered. “Sweet, be sure to get my good side. I’m kidding. But don’t get my left, seriously, I messed up this pseudo-mullet bad…”

What was up with this guy? John swallowed, aiming his flashlight at his heart-esque area. There was no ‘ding!’, no picture of a heart and a health meter. Shit, how was he supposed to do this!? He moved the light away. “Uh...So...Hey, eighties Strider ghost...I’m John...And you would be? First name…?”

“Dave.” He hopped off the table, pulling on his jacket in a typical coolkid way. “David ‘Dave’ Strider. Everyone calls me Dave, though, obviously. But seriously, dude, can you chuck that jacket outside? I’m sorta’ bound to it and unless it goes somewhere I’m fuckin’ stuck here, and seriously, I don’t need any more of this goddamn house.”

“Uh...yeah. Sure. Okay.”

 

 

 

~

 

“So this is the best one-- _Twinsanity_! The Naughty Dog games might be cool, but _Twinsanity_ is clearly the best one, I mean, look at how pretty it is!”

“John, I don’t even think you can comprehend how much I do not fucking care.”

John Egbert booted up his save file, the cheerful ‘oomah-oomah-oomaaaaah’ of the iceberg laboratory’s background track playing. It had been two weeks since John had discovered Dave, and already he had broken out his entire collection of _Crash Bandicoot_ games. Dave didn’t give a damn about his _Crash_ games, but John enjoyed having someone to share them with.

In this two weeks, John and Dave had gone from ‘you’re a rambling ghost in impossibly tacky clothing’ to ‘best dead friend ever’ and it was fantastic. John didn’t chuck the jacket out into the woods and instead wore it home, looking jolly for someone who was wearing a coat that most certainly was not anywhere near fashionable. He had shown the recording of Dave to Jade, but she seemed less than impressed with the fact he had filmed an intro to this dare video and then taped a table for a minute. She eventually called the dare off upon realizing that, clearly, he had no evidence of ghosts in that old house (and then she asked him what the shit was up with his jacket). It was then that he realized that only he could see Dave, but he didn’t know why, because he couldn’t see ghosts in the past. He wasn’t Jennifer Love Hewitt on that one show, _Ghost Whisperer_ , he couldn’t just do this out of the blue. The previous ghost he could whisper to was the Booberry cereal in the pantry because whenever he and dad went grocery shopping in October he simply had to buy all the General Mills monster cereals, it was practically law. So what made Dave so different…?

“Okay, so what’s up with _this_ installment? _Another_ evil mad scientist plot?”

“No, no, Dave. It’s twin parrots from another dimension so Crash and Cortex have to work together!”

“...What, _seriously_?” Dave deadpanned, leaning slightly closer to the television. “What the shit. You’re kidding, right? _Alternate dimension parrots_ , did you repeat this to yourself?”

“Said the coolkid who probably watched goddamn _He-Man_.”

“ _He-Man_ was the shit back then, okay? You don’t talk shit about _He-Man_.”

It had, of course, taken a few days for Dave to get up to date on all this new culture. He had been practically overwhelmed when John had strolled around his suburbs, showing him all the latest advances in technology and pop culture (“ _Ghostbusters_ had a sequel, a cartoon, _and_ a comic series! Isn’t that amazing!?”). Dave was actually rather impressed with it all, though a little disappointed in the lack of cool, spacey, futuristic things he was apparently really banking on. But he liked that things from his era were being remembered. _Ghostbusters_ , for one, but he appreciated the monster cereals in John’s pantry and goofy metal lunchbox, though he was less impressed when he discovered it had plain faded green stripes on it (“Y’know, in my day, you had a fucking _Pac-Man_ lunchbox in high school, nobody cared.”). In turn, Dave would recount fascinating tales of eighties pop culture, of Madonna and MTV music videos and bulky phones that could be put in your car. He also brought up, like, AIDS and shit and how that was a thing, but as he justified, when you’re sixteen and the self-proclaimed coolest kid in school, you didn’t need to care about AIDS.

“So you died a virgin?” John had asked when he brought this up, smiling like a doofus.

“John, if I could touch you, I’d fucking wring your neck and stuff _your_ coat in an abandoned house.” He had replied in the most perfect deadpan imaginable.

The more John looked at him, the longer Dave remained his dead ghost buddy, the more he got used to his impossibly tacky clothing. His half-not-really-mullet actually looked okay, sometimes. His shades looked okay with his face. John wouldn’t actually mind wearing those jeans, if only when he was alone and nobody was coming over anytime soon. And, of course, he was already wearing his Member’s Only jacket. The only thing John couldn’t bring himself to excuse was his shirt, because come on. Paint splatters? That was high fashion? John was feeling better and better about his Slimer shirt (that was not Slimer but a cheap anime knockoff, but that was a different story).

Dave actually looked nice, sometimes.

“So, twin parrots. So how the fuck do you kill them? Mask laser beam fight or…”

“That was _Warped_ , Dave. Duh. This one has a mecha bandicoot! And another giant mech for the parrots!”

“...Seriously, did the writers drop acid when they came up with this shit?”

“This game is _fantastic_ , Dave.”

John platformed his way through the iceburg laboratory and dipped into the first level, Slip-Slide Icecapades. He smiled as he watched the familiar cutscene play, having beaten this game four times already, one hundred percent. He loved _Twinsanity_ , and didn’t care about the shit other people said about it. It was fantastic.

“Y’know, back when I was livin’, Bro would give me, like, twenty dollars and I’d go to an arcade. We didn’t have any of these fuckin’ bandicoots. We had _Dragon’s Lair_. You know how much money I fucking spent on _Dragon’s Lair_ because I just kept goddamn dying!? Like, take a step, yet another stupid death. I never rescued that fucking princess.”

John chuckled. “I’m sure you could just YouTube the ending at this point.”

“What, and ruin the satisfaction of beating that game myself?” He said in mock horror. “Yeah, pull the ending up sometime. I need to know if all my hard-wasted money was worth it. Maybe then I can pass on. That’s how I’m goin’ to Heaven or Nirvana or wherever, John. Not by solving my death, not by assuring my nonexistent sister that I want her to stop freeloading at mom’s and get a job, by figuring out how _Dragon’s Lair_ ends.”

“Are you even religious?”

“John, for all I fuckin’ care, Ra and Zeus and Odin are partying hard up there, and Jesus is just some story they made up to throw us all off.”

“That makes _perfect_ sense, Dave.”

“I know.”

 

 

 

~

 

In school, Dave helped him cheat on everything.

“It’s ‘B’.” He said. He was kneeling beside John’s desk in economics, helping him with the multiple-choice portion of his test. “Like, sixty percent of everyone had ‘B’, so it’s obviously right.”

John wrote something in the corner of his test. _If you’re wrong, I’m making you watch some of my movies._

“Shit.” He muttered, and that was enough incentive to go off and find other answers for his test. John smirked to himself as he erased the message. Dave was not a fan of his choice in film, most likely because much of it was released post-death and John wasn’t great with synopses. He described the movie, going into insane detail on a few scenes and sometimes jumping over whole subplots and frankly it just left Dave hating his DVD collection.

Okay, maybe using a ghost to cheat on economics tests was a wee bit unethical, but if there were better education-related uses for the dead, he couldn’t think of any.

Dave floated over other desks, looking at everyone’s tests, calling out a few students when they were obviously cheating (the hypocrisy not going unnoticed by John, but Dave didn’t seem to acknowledge it) or picking answers that the majority of class did not pick. Of course, they couldn’t hear him, and while at first John had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing at Dave just babbling like a madman at people who couldn’t see him, he eventually learned how to block out the incessant noise. Eventually, he went back to John. “‘D’. Next one is most certainly ‘D’. So if I’m right, do I get to pick the movie? Like, get somethin’ from Netflix?”

_Fine._

“Totally righteous, dude.” Dave smirked, then paused, a look of true horror suddenly going across his face. He sat down at the girl next to John’s desk. “Holy shit. I used to say things like that unironically. I just had this epiphany, give me a minute.”

This time, John couldn’t hold in his snicker.

When class let out, John put his test on the front table and walked out of the room, his backpack over one shoulder. When Dave wasn’t immediately at his side, he paused and looked over his shoulder…

...Only to see it was Dave’s turn to grin like a doofus.

“John! Holy shit, John, look what I can do now!”

He rushed over to him. In his outstretched hands was a small purple mechanical pencil. The same one, in fact...He had seen on the classroom’s floor?

“You--You can move things now!?” John said, excited, but quickly quieted his tone. “Oh my God, Dave! That’s so cool!” He took the mechanical pencil from Dave’s hands, finding that he too could hold it and it wasn’t some kind of spirit pencil. “Nice!”

“Fuck yeah!” He cheered, swooping into the air and breaking his coolkid facade in his glee. “Watch out, mortals! Dave Strider can move things and will totally wreck your shit! Break picture frames, smash mirrors, topple vases! I’ll call you and pretend to be your dad, but your dad is dead, so who was the phone caller?”

“Tone it down, Dave.” John smiled, shaking his head. “You’ve gone from poltergeist to bad Creepypasta levels.”

 

 

 

~

 

On Christmas Day, a month later, Dave sat atop John's television as he and his dad unwrapped gifts.

John had purposely left the jacket in the living room just so Dave could do just that.

He watched as John obtained a long-awaited copy of _Robocop 2_ and a dilapidated stuffed bunny that was apparently the exact one from the movie _Con Air_ , which he immediately named Liv Tyler. He watched as John chuckled at the wooden spoon collection he had gotten his dad, as well as begrudgingly admitting to buying him three more (distinctly seasonal) boxes of Betty Crocker cake mix, even though John made it very clear he hated the company.

John gathered his presents (all in one trip, of course), being careful to put Dave’s coat atop the whole stack. Dave floated on beside him. “Hey, Egbert.”

“Yeah, Strider?”

“I gotcha’ something, too.”

John blinked, looking at Dave, raising an eyebrow. “You can’t leave the house. How’d you get it without me knowing?”

“Very carefully.” He replied in that perfect deadpan of his, and you knew that Dave wasn’t about to spill the beans on this particular mystery. But that was okay.

The two of them made their way up to John’s room. Once in there, Dave went under John’s bed, and with a great deal of effort pulled out a box wrapped in newspapers. “Pfff, can’t actually move things all _that_ well. Anyway. Merry Christmas, Egbert.”

He knelt down, peeling off the newspapers that were haphazardly taped onto the box. Once the newspapers were gone, John saw a mere shoebox. Curious, he opened it and removed the tissue paper.

Roller skates. An insipid beige, with brown laces and orange base and wheels. But still roller skates.

“I would have got you the _Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles_ skates, but I thought you’d just look like more of a dork.”

John blinks at the footwear. “You...You got me roller skates.”

“Yeah.”

“... _Why_ did you get me roller skates?”

“Okay, first of all, they weren’t that hard to smuggle out. Two, roller skates were the shit when I was alive. And C, roller skating is hip. You could skate backwards. Fucking backwards, John. There was whole rinks for this shit. Couple’s skate.”

John frowned at them for a long time. He didn’t really want them, and he couldn’t really roller skate (his elementary school had a rollerblading unit and he couldn’t do that for jack shit), but Dave did presumably steal these and he had to keep them to be ni--

Wait, couple’s skate?

Oh.

Oh my.

Dave didn’t just get him beige-and-orange roller skates for ironic purposes or something.

He wanted someone to skate with.

Dave liked John.

 

 

 

~

 

The next day, John pulled his own newspaper-wrapped lump out for Dave.

“If this is a G.I. Joe, I’m gonna fucking punch you.”

“It’s not a G.I. Joe. Open it!”

Dave fumbled with the wrappings. Despite his ability to grab and move things, it still proved slightly difficult for him.

The newspaper littered the bedroom’s floor.

In his hands were new aviator sunglasses.

Dave’s mouth twitched into a smile. He took off his old Wayfarers and tossed them haphazardly on the floor. He put on the new shades John had gotten him. “So! How do I look?”

John smiled back. “Actually, not half bad.” He paused, and then, “Well, maybe I should have worked on buying actual nice clothes for you first. They look sorta out of place here.”

He snickered. “Y’think everyone else’ll see just some floating sunglasses? Oooh, spooky.”

“Oh, we could have gone all _Invisible Man_ on you! Trenchcoat and boots and gloves and a scarf and stuff!”

“Fuck yeah, my ascension to horror movie star will be complete.”

The both of them laughed. John paused, smiling at Dave again. “And, y’know, maybe a couple’s skate may not be so bad.”

There’s a pause as he processes this. Then he blushes a bit. Not hard, just enough to be noticeable and to show he understood.

John was hypothetically dating a dead guy now.

That was cool.

 

 

 

~

 

John regretted taking zero hour gym.

It was March, a horribly damp March day. He was in his gym uniform; a black shirt with red-black athletic shorts, high white socks and faded grey sneakers. When Dave had seen it, he remarked that it seemed like his school was trying to educate him to be a supervillain (“Because only dark lords wear all red and black.”).

Through January and February, John embraced his possible necrophilic tendencies (was it really necrophilia if it was a ghost from the eighties?) and began going all romantic with Dave. Sure, sometimes he wondered where these feelings came from. It was only back in October, after all, that you had found him in the abandoned house, lying on the table. And now, here you were, wondering when you could get back to the locker room to get your jacket and see him again.

He tried to teach John how to use those roller skates he’d gotten him (and John was, indeed, shit at it). They’d watch a few movies and John would laugh like a doofus at anything remotely funny or so-bad-it’s-good moments, while Dave kept up a perfectly snarky commentary though the whole thing. When he and his dad went out to eat, they’d pretend it was a date. But it wasn’t a date, because dad couldn’t see the boyfriend in the situation and making any flirty comments would come off as awkward. Dave told wonderfully dated jokes from the eighties (Q: What did Michael Jackson do when his hair caught fire? A: Beat it!) and John broke out _Crash Bash!_ and let Dave try to play it. They were complete assholes to each other the whole time, but in the fun way.

So here John was, trotting out to the soccer / football / whatever the shit the school wanted it to be court and wishing it was cold enough to bring that Member’s Only jacket with him. He wanted Dave here to mercilessly mock everyone in this gym class.

His phone, which he’d brought out here on account of he often brought his phone with him, went off.

It was Jade.

_hey! make sure the coach doesn’t see you and come on! im buying starbucks today!_

Jade and John always went to Starbucks when neither of you wanted to go to your zero hour classes. He smiled and looked over. Coach wouldn’t notice. Besides, John was shit at soccer and everyone knew it, so what would he really be doing?

He looked down at his phone as he trotted off to the curb, hopped down it, and into the street.

_sweet! don’t order anything for me yet, i think i’m going to try something_

A bus horn blared.

A schoolbus couldn’t break in time.

The phone crunched.

 

 

 

~

 

“Egbert.”

Silence.

“Egdork.”

Silence.

“Egmcmuffin. Egroll. Hard boiled egs, softboiled egs, sunny-side up egs. Get up Egbert.”

John’s eyes opened and he saw Dave’s face over him. John smiled with a weak chuckle. “Daaave, what are you doing? You can’t leave your jacket. You were bound to it or something.”

He looks away. “Not anymore.”

“Well, why are you here? I mean, you should be in the locker room--”

“John. John. Look.”

John propped himself on his elbows as he looked over. People were putting a boy on a stretcher. He didn’t look so good, not to bloodied up on the outside, but clearly not alright. He had smashed glasses and a bus was stopped and the ambulance workers took him away.

Someone scraped a crushed phone from off the ground.

“Hey...That looks like mine.” John said, his voice growing increasingly flat with each word.

“It’s yours, Egbert.”

John blinked, standing up. “...What? N-no, that can’t be, I was about to go see Jade and…”

“John, how do I say this politely? You were hit by a fucking bus.”

The phrase hit him like another fucking bus. He stared at the stretcher as they wheeled it farther and farther, to the ambulance. “...No…”

“...Yeah.”

John dropped back to his knees and he began crying.

He shivered and sobbed and he is suddenly overtaken by everything. His dad. Jade. All those presents he got for nothing and all the time he spent with Dave and how little time he really spent with those up here, those who were alive, and all those people who will proceed to think him walking out in front of a bus was on purpose.

Dave put a hand on John’s shoulder. He’s still shivering and sobbing. Dave sighs a little and then says, gently, “Well, we both died in clothes we’ll eventually regret.”

John hiccuped, chuckled, and sobbed again.

Everything had just come together at last, and he died at sixteen to a bus because he was texting Jade. A virgin, a dork, a doofus with goofy movie taste and a PS2. He didn’t know what to do next, what he could do next. Everything felt just so wrong.

Dave picked up John slightly until he’s standing with a few shivers. He took John’s hand. “Well, c’mon. I think I know where we hafta’ go.”

“W...Where?”

“Didn’t I say I wasn’t religious? C’mon. I’m not stuck to the coat anymore. We’ll go find our own goddamn heaven.” He paused, smirking a bit. "Hey. Maybe I'm stuck to you now. Wouldn't that be cheesy."

And as he pulled John along, down the road, he's just so thankful he has Dave to be there to glue everything back together.

He couldn’t have asked for a better boyfriend.

Even if his fashion taste back in the eighties was shit.

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah. It's me, Lissamel. I do collabs with JaysNarnia sometimes. Anyway, she was feelin' sick, so I promised to write her some JohnDave, and this came out. So if you like it, comment or favorite or something.
> 
> Sorry if it's a wee bit clunky, but it was literally written in a day just to cheer her up. So yeah.


End file.
